
I found this Jacobin article which focuses on Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jewish revolutionary activist who exposed Germany’s genocide in what was then German South West Africa. She said, in her essay “Proletarian Women” (1912):
The workshop of the future requires many hands and hearts. A world of female misery is waiting for relief. The wife of the peasant moans as she nearly collapses under life’s burdens. In German Africa, in the Kalahari Desert, the bones of defenseless Herero women are bleaching in the sun, hunted down by a band of German soldiers and subjected to a horrific death of hunger and thirst. …
Three years later, she again recalled the litany of colonial crimes in her famous Junius Pamphlet:
The present world war is a turning point in the course of imperialism . . . The “civilized world” that has stood calmly by when this same imperialism doomed tens of thousands of Hereros to destruction; when the desert of Kalahari shuddered with the insane cry of the thirsty and the rattling breath of the dying . . . when in Tripoli the Arabs were mowed down, with fire and swords, under the yoke of capital while their civilization and their homes were razed to the ground.
Please check out the article on the Jacobin website to read more about this woman activist who at a time when very few could talk, she denounced the genocide perpetrated by German forces in Africa, particularly in Namibia. She pointed out that the “civilized world” stood by when atrocities were committed in Namibia… it seems like history has repeated itself around the globe for the past century with atrocities perpetrated in many places, while the civilized world or international community has stood by doing nothing or sometimes lending a hand to those perpetrating it. Like Rosa Luxemburg, let’s not turn a blind eye… let’s be part of the solution, and not the problem.
